Joyce F. Jones was sentenced last year to 30 days in jail for striking a Naperville boy. She is being sued along with the former bus driver and the First Student bus company that employed them.

Joyce F. Jones was sentenced last year to 30 days in jail for striking a Naperville boy. She is being sued along with the former bus driver and the First Student bus company that employed them. (Naperville Police Department)

A former school bus monitor who repeatedly slapped an autistic boy from Naperville in her care is being sued along with the former bus driver and the First Student bus company that employed them.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in DuPage County on behalf of the boy and his mother, both of Naperville, seeks at least $300,000 in damages for a series of incidents over a three-month period in 2016 in which the boy, then 9, was struck by former bus monitor, Joyce Jones, and was "verbally scolded, threatened, teased, intimidated and provoked" by the former bus driver Joseph Hamilton, according to the document.

Jones, Hamilton and First Student, which is headquartered in Ohio, are named in the lawsuit. The newspaper is not naming the boy or his mother to protect his privacy as a child crime victim.

Jones was sentenced to 30 days in jail by a DuPage County judge after she was found guilty last July on six counts of misdemeanor battery for striking the boy. Hamilton pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in connection with the abuse and was sentenced to 50 hours of community service and a $350 fine.

Both Jones and Hamilton were fired by First Student.

Attorney Michael Krzak, who is representing the family, said the actions of the employees of First Student are "unconscionable."

"They engaged in conduct which mocked a young special needs boy," he said. "They victimized a young boy who did not have a voice of his own and tormented him when their job was to protect him."

Because her son is nonverbal, the mother said it took seven months to trace the origin of extreme changes in her son's behavior. It wasn't until she asked Indian Prairie School District 204 to pull First Student's audio and visual recordings from cameras on the bus that she realized what was the cause of the distress.

The mother said her son, now 11, was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and no longer rides a bus to school.

Krzak said the boy's mother filed the lawsuit to give children like her son a voice.

"Parents throughout Illinois and throughout the country entrust their children to bus companies like First Student every single day to get them to school safely," Krzak said. "The fact that two employees of First Student would torment a child over an extended period of time without either of them reporting what was going on speaks to the utter lack of training and review on the part of First Student."